Dreams of Dreamer.
A chemical needle to knit the raveled sleeve of care.
Only, not enough.
Not enough Dreamer to go around. Not enough to bring rest to every mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son, uncle, aunt, cousin, friend. A taste for sleep, a craving for it the world over, and only one curb for the general appetite.
So yes, the dollars rained down. A year or two earlier and it would have been raining Euro and yuan. But the initial SLP hysteria had put paid to the European Union and the might of that combined economy. Once Italy had been quarantined as the suspected ground zero of the disease, it had taken less than a month for all the countries of the union to seal their borders. Trade and travel faltered, xenophobia and nationalism flourished, and pounds, lira, francs, deutschmarks, and various other quaint relics were soon being dug out from beneath rocks in the gardens and put back into circulation. As for China, the world had seen the relative quality of the dragon’s infrastructure when the earth shook in 2008. Tens of millions of sleepless leaving the workforce, burdening the health-care system, combined with the effective end of economic globalization and the contraction of markets clamoring for inexpensive goods, hexed the Chinese Miracle. The engine of their economy shuddered, lurched, and crashed to the ground, soon to be followed by the thrown-together factories of manufacturing cities like Shenzhen, as the inhabitants returned to the countryside, fleeing the plague, leaving the buildings and roads to deteriorate and begin crumbling in scant months. When the great droughts struck and wiped out the rice crops, it was an almost unnecessary grace note to the collapse.
The Yankee dollar ruled again.
The combined weight of the subprime fiasco, collapsed investment and commercial banking, credit freeze, and the GDP-sucking military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran had certainly wounded the beast, but once the United States declared de facto bankruptcy by refusing to pay its international creditors, it roared back to life.
The roads and bridges were crumbling, the waterways drying and clogging, the forests burning, the last-ditch conversion to national health was a Byzantine horror for the millions and millions forced into its clutches, power failed with great regularity, gasoline was nigh unto a luxury item, and one could not always be certain that the local supermarket would have received a toilet paper delivery this week, but the standard of living had been so vastly higher in the United States than in most of the rest of the world that there was still quite a distance left to fall before hitting the ground.
Global food shortages that might have struck deeper in the United States with the slaughter of the beefs were offset when the grain that had fed the bulk of the herds was redirected to human consumption. Corn, long bioengineered to pest and drought resistance, was the new American staple, as it was the world over; we just had more of it.
Free from the illusion that its debts could ever be paid, America was rich again. Yes, it did draw inward, a spine-backed turtle bristling with ICBMs, expeditionary forces establishing kill zones around the oil fields in Iraq, Venezuela, and Brazil, but still, in one way or another, it was the source of a dream.
Dreamer, a pillar of the new new economy.
There were mutterings.
It seemed odd that something so specific as DR33M3R should be so far along in development when the SL prion struck. After all, why should anyone have anticipated the need for an artificial hormone that could induce, in even the most damaged brain, one crippled by growths of amyloid plaques and peppered with star-shaped astrocytes, the long rolling delta waves that cradle bursts of REM sleep?
Congressional hearings were a must. Closed congressional hearings. And from what one heard, they seemed to answer all questions. Or, in any case, all questions that were asked. Whatever those may have been. In any case, when the doors opened, the patent holders on Dreamer came out smiling.
And why not? The world might have been ending, but Afronzo-New Day Pharm had what everyone wanted while the credits rolled. You could see it in the smile on Parsifal K. Afronzo Sr.’s face, as he read his prepared statement: A new day was clearly dawning.
And Park, in the month during which the chances of being infected with SLP had grown to one in ten, with the name Afronzo, Parsifal, K., Jr., on the screen of his computer, thought about what Beenie had said, that Hydo knew “the guy.” He opened the file, a spreadsheet unfolding, cells filled with long number sets that struck a distant chord without imparting any meaning. But he listened to that chord and wondered if he heard a cracking in the ice around the world. Uncertain to say if it was the sound of a fracture announcing a thaw or another layer freezing over.
6
CASTING MY EYES TOWARD LAX FROM CENTURY TOWER NORTH the evening before had been, as it turned out, prophetic. While a call from the National Guard for close air support for an operation east of the I-5 required a redistribution of resources, still the dawn found me a Thousand Storks International airship, cruising at an altitude that would hopefully make us an outside chance for any Crenshaw denizens wishing to amuse themselves by taking potshots as we crossed their airspace on approach. Not that the risk was excessive. Yes, a certain amount of military-grade ordnance was making its way into the community, but only a handful of Stingers or other surface-to-air missiles had been confirmed as fired thus far. And only one target struck.
Changing our heading above South Vermont, I could see, over the shoulder of the door gunner and her M60D, the rearmed compound of the Crenshaw Christian Center, a sign painted across the parking lot proclaiming it to be still THE HOME OF THE FAITH DOME, despite the fact that over half of said dome had been gutted by fire when the ATF task force raided it.
Well, like hope, faith, I’ve been told, springs eternal. So why not its dome?
Then we were dropping over the sprawling shantytown that had come to occupy the long-term parking lots surrounding the airport. Refugees fleeing insurgent-gang warfare in Inglewood.
Coming in low over the firetrap maze, the helicopter pilot’s voice, French-accented, came across the headset radio.
“I flew a Bell for Médecins sans Frontières in 2007. In Darfur. Before the final genocide.”
Leaving it to the gunner and myself to decipher why he felt the need to interject this bit of biography into the silence.
On the ground, my headset off and having taken a moment to ruffle my hair back into some kind of shape, I slipped on my vintage Dunhill 6011s and leaned into the cockpit.
“I’ll be at least two hours.”
The pilot continued flipping switches, completing his shutdown.
“On thirty minutes’ notice, we have clearance to take off.”
My eyebrows, I confess, rose behind the oversize lenses of my sunglasses.
“Thirty minutes?”
He jerked his thumb at the sky.
“Not as it was. The traffic. Thirty minutes’ notice, you can fly.”
He pointed in the direction of the U.S. Department of Defense-commandeered southern airstrip of LAX.
“Unless the fucking Army closes airspace. Then.”
He turned his thumb to the ground.
“Then we all crawl.”
“Even Thousand Storks?”
He shrugged.
“Thousand Storks carries the guns, but Pentagon pays the bills. All birds, when they say, we become dodo. Or.”
He made his fingers like missiles, aimed at the sky.
“Shoot first. No warning.”
He tilted his head east.
“That Air India flight, they say it gets hit by a gangbanger. Lucky shot with a Soviet-era Strela. Yes?”
I nodded.
He shook his head.
“Merde. Fucking bullshit.”
He spit out the window toward the olive drab tents.
“Gung-ho. Trigger-happy. Yes?”